Tag Archives: PPC

Aug 17

The goal of all marketing is to create unfair advantage. In digital marketing, advantage comes from being in the right place, at the right time, with the right message. Unfair advantage comes from a defensible custom process that creates advantage in place, time or message. An unfair advantage cannot be copied, bought, or replicated and like all secrets, it ages poorly. An unfair advantage cannot come from commercial tools because your competitor can buy the same product, take the same training, and your advantage disappears. An unfair advantage cannot be discovered in an article, study, or white paper because your competitor has access to the same knowledge. An unfair advantage is fleeting because once discovered by your competitor it vanishes. An unfair advantage has a limited lifespan and businesses must continue to invest in “What’s Next” to create, or maintain the next unfair advantage.

About Me

Over the last 46 years I have been a soldier, programmer, and digital marketing executive. My professional career started with 7 years in the US Army, which taught me leadership, tactics, and strategy. Followed by school and 16 years in custom software development. I was rapidly promoted from Programmer, to Systems Analyst, to Project Manager, to Executive Management, ultimately becoming the CEO. This was followed by 23 years as Digital Marketing Agency CEO in a business that morphed primary focus from SEO to PPC. I have always been attracted to the impossible problem of marketing and my teams were always staffed with smart and independent thinkers. I live by the rule of never working with someone who is not better than myself at what they do. I believe that team diversity brings strength and perspective to the team. With my recent retirement as CEO, I have moved to the role of Senior Data Scientist and I now have the freedom to work on the projects I love with people I deeply respect. My new life mission is to create experiments to discover patterns and relationships in marketing data that can be leveraged into unfair advantage for our clients.

Finding Clients with Strategic Synergy

To accomplish this, my first task is to find clients with whom we have a strategic synergy. To be a reasonable fit the client must be reasonably sized (minimum monthly ad spend of $25K) with a professional marketing management team in place that understands and appreciates the complexity and business opportunity value in programmatic digital marketing. Of the active clients that I managed as CEO of SMS we have had probably a dozen clients that fit this profile. Indeed, they are the top 1% of their industry and intend to continue that position.

Profiling one of our large clients, they manage over $100k a month in PPC for 30+ locations providing a home service that includes repair, service, and installation for both residential and commercial customers. As a professionally managed business they are active in all channels of marketing including digital and conventional advertising and PR. The manager is brilliant and understands the business to a level that nobody outside their industry will ever reach. He understands the complexity and tradeoffs involved in marketing and is willing to test new concepts under a fail-early strategy. I have met with this manager every week for the last 8 years so I know that his account has no fundamental problems left but he also knows that the improvement opportunity is huge. If we could accomplish the impossible of perfect timing, placement, and message the improvement would be 96%. With an annual budget of $1.6 million this approaches a business value of almost $50 million in business opportunity. Perfect marketing is a lofty goal but it is not realistic, however there is always room for improvement. If we can improve this account, moving the success rate from a typical 2% to 4%, the business value of that is $1.6 million! We just need to improve the system by 2%.

Why this must be a custom solution

If it’s not custom then it cannot be protected and the advantage will be lost as the market adopts the new best practice. There is an industry full of developers creating commercial products to the largest possible audience. This is how they create leverage and how they monetize the technology. Look at product like WordStream, Marin Software, Kenshoo, Optmyzr, and all their cousins. These are great products, but they are general use designed to fit the largest possible audience. They create advantage only until your competitor buys the same product or a better one. Custom solutions are perfectly fitted to the specific business with no compromise in the process. Tool developers are rarely experts in the industry, they write code for. Custom solutions take time and money to create and this creates a barrier to the competition as does protecting it as a trade secret.

The Digital Marketing Trifecta – Place, Time, and Message

Aligning three elements is an advertising utopia and perfection is impossible. However, improvement is certainly possible. When you examine the simple math of aligning three variables it does not take a lot of change in a variable to improve the response. Of these three variables, the big one is time because it is within time that the demand is created. The place and message need to be on target but detecting or improving the odds of the time is where most of the opportunity exists. Time is largely created by a knowledge of the business and the events that drive it. I believe that unfair advantage will come from bringing outside data into the AdWords strategy.

The AI Path to the Solution

We believe that progress in this this will come from the AI/Machine Learning/Deep Learning field. Using the tools that are rapidly developing in this space we should be able to build models to evaluate data feeds from advertising networks, websites, and other sources to make better decisions. Considering that failure rates in advertising are often 98% there is plenty of room for massive improvement.

If you are interested in being a partner in this journey in Marketing AI please call Bob Dumouchel at 800.272.0887 or email bob@smsrd.com

28

Mar 17

As the old saying goes, “be careful for what you wish for; you may receive it” is something that holds very true in today’s world, especially when it involves the Click Through Rate of your AdWords account.

In a recent article, we discussed the new Added By AdWords testing going on and Google’s assertion that these ads would help improve performance by 5%-15%. While they did not specifically state the scope of metrics this applies to, our suspicion is that this is related to Click-through Rate.

While Click-through Rate is an important aspect to look at, as it is one of the major factors that helps determine Quality Score (improving this can decrease your Cost per Click), your ultimate focus as an advertiser needs to be on generating additional business for yourself, not Google.

Sometimes what is good for Google (higher click through rate) isn’t necessarily going to lead to beneficial results (improved Conversion Rate) on your end. For example, Dynamic Keyword Insertion helps adjust the headline of your ads to match the search that someone conducted. While we see many cases where this helps to improve Click through Rates, many of these cases have led to lower Conversion Rates.

While consideration to Quality Score impact needs to be seriously evaluated before taking this step, there are occasional instances where undermining your Click-through Rate can actually help your business. One case we ran into in the past involved a B2B client that was focused on higher scale projects.

Initially, the Click-through Rate for this client’s traffic was high but the quality of leads coming in was not. In this case, the solution we came up with was to pre-qualify people within the ad (by saying that the client would only take projects at a certain dollar amount or over).

This had an immediate impact on account performance. In Google’s eyes, overall performance went in the tank as the Click-through Rate of these ads saw a significant decline. In the Client’s eyes, AdWords performance improved substantially as the quality of sales leads he received improved.

The takeaway out of all of this is that discretion needs to be exercised before making changes that fall in line with what Google recommends because the adjustments that benefit them do not necessarily benefit you as the advertiser.

14

Mar 17

What if we told you that Google is starting a new pilot where they believe they can do a better job writing your ads than you? This may sound crazy but as they say, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

The Ads Added by AdWords pilot has been publicly known for a little over a month but the more we think about it, the more we have concerns about it for advertisers over the long-term.

While Google claims these ads see performance improvement of 5%-15%, we believe that Advertisers need to have authenticity in their voice and controlling how ads are presented is an important part of this process. By transferring part of this process to someone who is not associated with your business or someone hired to represent that voice on your behalf, weakens the authenticity of this voice in our opinion.

The good news is if you like controlling the messaging on your own ads; it is very easy to opt out. There are a couple ways you can stop this process.

1 – Check to see whether this has been applied to your AdWords account

Currently, the percentage of accounts opted into this feature is very small. To check whether you are among these, you will want to click on the Ads tab go to Columns menu, click on modify columns and under attributes you will want to select the icon next to Labels and click apply.

2 – Check the labels and see if any of them say “Added by AdWords”

If anything, it is at least easy to identify which ads have been added by AdWords and which ones have not. The first step you will want to do is remove these ads. Even if you see that this feature has not been applied to your account, the reality is that pausing or not having any of these ads in the first place means there is merely no symptom and there is work to do in removing the source which leads us to…

3 – Request to be opted out of this test

The good news is that you can get yourself opted out of this “feature”. By filling out this form, you are able to opt out of the Added by AdWords feature and ensure that you maintain control of the ads that are seen by your prospects.

While this has been launched on a small scale so far, the progress of this will need to be monitored in the coming months. The good news is that if you have concerns about this, it is easy to avoid having this impact the ads being run in your AdWords account.